bjoernvold.com

I have struggled with what to recommend to newbies lately.

In the old days it was easy to say Mandriva or even Ubuntu. Later on it was Mint.
What I did not like about them was that you will have to re-install or upgrade them regularly. And that is wasted time since you use your OS for producing great intellectual property.

Why should you spend time under the hood when you only want to drive the car - it is the same thing. Newbies do not want to be mechanics it does not make sense - and they are met with a horde of experienced Linux mechanics who have forgotten to speak plain "English":

"Just enter the CLI and type Code: Select all salt '*' pkg.upgrade but remember to do it as root. You cannot use the GUI for this and frankly I prefer the CLI as should you!" Our newbie friend who is of sound mind and has always been regarded as intelligent, is now wondering What is CLI what is GUI and what t.h. is root???? And who can blame him? He just wants to write a book. He wants to be told about updates and click that popup once in a while and that will update his system.

He sure does not want to go through the process every 6 months either so that system should preferably just update forever. And oh yes it must be easy to install, of course. In other words stability, reliability and ease of use, and it should be fast and run on not to peachy hardware.... So does this distro exist? Manjaro is not quite there yet. Mint has the Debian based rolling LMDE release but I had a lot of problems with it especially if I forgot to update often. And Mint dropped to develop the rolling XFCE and KDE version. This annoyed some people who started the SolydX project to make a rolling Debian (Testing) based XFCE and KDE distro. The Kde version is called SolydK.

......

So I decided to install it.
The installer is user friendly and really simple. You cannot go wrong you click on maps and get your timezone and location right. Keyboard is easily set.
But here I came across a problem that will only affect Norwegian users:
There was no Norwegian locale -- well there was nn and sami which is written by about 10 % of the Norwegians , but no nb-NO which is used by the other 90 percent

So I just set the Norwegian keyboard and chose the English locale. After that the installation went smooth. User was created root password set partitions were no problem; the newbie can just press enter if in doubt - and it will be fine.

Time to reboot and there is the SolydX welcome screen:

Using it Solydx comes in an Enterprise version and in a Home version. I picked the Home version because it will have the latest software while the Enterprise version will have a three year support and nothing much will change during that period. This should indicate that we are dealing with a pretty stable distro here.

So time to fix that Norwegian language then - Newbies should look away since this only goes for Norwegians:
and here i could pick nb-NO UTF8 and set it as default.
(Yes - I know; this is jiberish mechanic talk -just ignore it ).

And there we are at a clean and easy to handle desktop. It comes with the great whisker menu (with the even greater Norwegian translation ) on the bottom left as we are used to.

This is a menu and combined control panel. If you click the icons on top of the menu you will have settings at your disposal or you can lock the screen or shut down or log out - it is easy.

You can search for the apps and if your system needs update an icon to the bottom right will tell you. You can simply click it and your system will update.

But what if you want to install an App that is not there? Ah I thought you would never ask - for that we have the Software manager:


And there you will find 40 featured apps, 959 Graphics Apps, 316 Office Apps, 1824 Games, 462 Fonts +++++ In total there are 63344 Apps
So you will not miss anything.

I clicked the featured Apps first and found my favorite editor Geany



I just clicked install - and that was it You will also find Scite or other notepads in the Software manager.
Everything is this easy to install - No fiddling under the hood.

Experienced Debian users will say what about Synaptic?

Yes it is there so you can use it - you don't have to. You can also use the plymouth manager to set the most fantastic splash screens easily, but you don't have to.

In fact SolydX (XFCE) comes with a lot installed so you will not miss much. There is no Libreoffice; Abiword was chosen to keep this distro lightweight and fast. You will have no problem with installing Libreoffice from the Software manager though.

So far SolydX lives up to it's slogan:
Linux desktop made easy

It will fit nicely on those old boxes that run XP and be way faster. SolydX uses 262 MB of Memory with a terminal and Htop running - that is nothing!

With Firefox and three tabs open it uses less than 450 MB.
I will leave it there for some time to check out the stability - and report back, but being a Debian based distro that part seems OK already.
And do you have to be a newbie to use this one?

Definitely not! It is Debian based so you can fiddle under the hood as much as you want . It is the system they use in space

To test the lightness of the distro I set the MEM to 1 GB and fired up a terminal with Htop, Firefox with 4 tabs open, and Abiword at the same time. It was all very snappy and stayed under 750 MB of mem.

Some more checkpoints:

Flash works out of the box,

Java does not work so I have to install icedtea-7-plugin. After that install; java works fine.

Sound works great so I am listening to Youtube (Andrew sisters of course)
To make SolydX auto resize when I drag the edges of my Virtualbox; I installed virtualbox-guest-dkms (just search for it in the Software manager and install it).
This works fine.

viking60 wrote:To make SolydX auto resize when I drag the edges of my Virtualbox; I installed virtualbox-guest-dkms (just search for it in the Software manager and install it).
This works fine.

Auto-Size Guest worked for me out of the box on VirtualBox v4.3.6 with SolydX/32 v201405.

S.

Hm I have installed the 64bit version even though I have 1 GB mem and one processor (Clasisc 32bit HW). It might have better functionality since 32 bit is going to be phased out.

Well I have had my first upgrade now. The icon on the bottom right indicated that there were updates so I clicked it.

The upgrade started and also included the Linux 3,14 kernel. It stopped to show what would be installed so I had to click "install" to complete the process.

I am not to sure that a newbie wants this choice but for experienced users it makes sense. I rebooted and everything worked just fine.

But that update icon did still indicate that there were updates so I clicked it again - and there were no updates!
A new reboot did not make any difference it kept indicating updates and there were none.

It had no negative effect on the functionality of the system - but it is annoying.
Edit:
This might have something to do with the lack of the nb-NO locale during installation. It turns out that iceweasel was "kept back":

So I removed iceweasel and the update went through and the icon did indicate correctly - in fact it was correct all the time since there were updates, but they were "kept back" .
...

Changing the repos in the update manager seems impossible while I can easily check the speed of the mirrors and check the one I want - It is impossible to save it.

This is no showstopper - everything will work. There is another thing that bothers me though and that is the "Here today gone tomorrow" syndrom.

And a distro that is gone tomorrow is not newbie friendly. Other than that; I think that this is a good distro to start with.
It is way better for a beginner than Zorin
Edit
I noticed that the encfs encryption does not work It is the exact behavior of this old Bug

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/744542

Also there seem to be references to fuse-utils that are not present in the repos.

Update:
After having left it alone for a while, it was time to update Solyd X. So I used the update symbol and updated a lot. After a reboot it prompted me for the login and jumped right back to the login and all the graphics were gone.

So basically I have a big black login screen that I cannot get past Probably due to an update that has gone wrong (fubared xscreensaver?).
So that is a big turnoff and certainly nothing to recommend for a newbie.

It is hard to recommend this to a newbie - I think Manjaro just got the upper hand there at least for rolling releases....

What I have done to fix it is to pick the "safe mode" (on all SolydX installations) boot option which prompted me for the root password and sent me to a terminal where I could update "manually" :

and


I'll let you know if that fixes it...
...That brought me the graphics back but the login is still an eternal loop
I can log in as root though...but:

Not newbie friendly.